30 -- - -..... .. "' ,9 .. . .. . .. \, '" .{. . , l 5 y, D n"t -- 4 " .. $ . '" .. . .. .' .. .' ., ., ><? .:- <R... " . '. . . 11 ,4t .. :"\ ,. - t .: ..r . ... . "" """""""""""""" ,", . . ..:.... ". - . . . . . "." " ",,,., - .::..}';" ,'" .,". . . . . .... . . .. '>(j>: .. ..... . The Man Who Likes the Beach but Only When He Has It All to Himself . in Tel Aviv, it would be as hideous as Athens. In Jerusalem, an eighty-five- year-old priest kicked me out of St. Saviour's Church. I went in there dur- ing a service, and my camera made a very loud noise. A priest rushed back and said, 'Are you a Christian? No, you're a tourist. Y ou have to leave immediately!' I apologized, and we had a nice talk. He speaks eight lan- guages. He guessed my age, and then he told me he was being polite. He guessed forty, but he really thought I was fifty. He blessed me in Chinese. I have his address." After a moment, Janet said, "If I were religious, I would want to believe in reincarnation." She dumped some Brussels sprouts into a pot. "My Is- raeli friend Shamai said that in the Jewish religion everybody comes back newborn. I never knew that. He said, 'Even your mother will come back.' I said, 'You mean I'm going to be new- born with the same mother? What kind of religion is that?' " . Janet looked under a dish towel. "Where are my eyeglasses?" Not Bitter S OMETIMES things start out small and then get-well, bigger. Mustard seeds, acorns, you name it. "It began because our brew, scien- tifically, has fewer bitterness units than much of the competition," said Richard Penrock, a public-relations man handling the Kronenbourg-beer account. "With the distinction of having fewer bitterness units, we thought of saying that Kronenbourg was less hitter. And from that came the advertising theme 'Better, Not Bit- ter.' " And from there things gradu- ally got out of hand, as can happen when beer is involved, and it all cul- minated last week in an East Side bis- tro when Kronenbourg brass made a presentation of the first "Better, Not Bitter" award-to Geoff Smith, the man who finished a dramatic and 1 tucked-in second in this fall's New York City Marathon. "Sure, it started out as a taste slogan, but it's more than that," said Bob Wilson, the executive vice-president, as he hoisted a schoo- ner of his golden product. "The entire thing may become a life philoso- phy. We don't just say, 'Drink better, not bitter.' We say, 'Live better, not bitter.' It's a very positive statement, and at a time when we're finding a lot of negative things in life. In life, it's not how fast you are, it's the distance you run. And it's not just in life. It's also in people." "People" in this case meant Smith, and "the distance you run" meant twenty-six miles three hundred and eighty-five yards, twenty-three miles of which Smith covered at a world's- record clip, only to be overtaken by a New Zealander, Rod Dixon, with the finish line blurrily in his sight. We asked Smith his opinion of Wil- son's credo that "in some things there are no losers." Smith, an engagingly cocky and decent fellow, is a thirty-year-old na- tive of England and former fireman, whose New York appearance marked the first marathon of his life. He looked up from his beer to say, "Ac- tually, I got beat. I wanted to win- that's what it's about-but it's nice that someone recognizes the guy who finished second. I got maybe a hundred and fifty fan letters after that, and they sent me several cases of that wa- ter-urn, Perrier." Smith also said that he is planning an assault on the world's five-thousand-metre record; that he eats steak and chips before races; that he "didn't run a step for al- most a week" after the N ew York race; and that at his local pub he drinks Guinness, but once, on the way home from a Belgian meet, he and his mates had bought a case of Kronenbourg, because the store was giving away drinking glasses. Smith and Wilson posed for a num- ber of pictures at the bar (whose tend- er had turned in a respectable three hours forty-nine minutes and twenty- five seconds in the marathon). A lot of the shots managed to work in Smith's T -shirt, which said, of course, "Bet- ter, Not Bitter." "Our beer really is less hoppy-the brewing process vali- dates the claim," said Mr. Wilson. "In England, the Kronenbourg slo- gan, believe it or not, is 'Strong . . . But Silent,' which sort of implies strength. " (